Italian Sabres Ejection seat colours

[Paolo6691]

Hi all

I am midway trough an Airfix F-86E I want to finish as an Italian airforce plane.

I had a look around the internet and I found some pictures with ejection seat in what could be dull silver or very light grey, but then I found a comment here on Brit, from, I think Giorgio N (Sorry it seems I can't find it right now), saying that the seats on Italian planes were Black.

I checked the pics I have and he is right you can clearly see the upper frame being black, also the head rest is black too. now my question is very simple, was the seat completely black?

Does anybody have a picture?

Thanks

Paolo

[Tony Edmundson]

Hi all

I am midway trough an Airfix F-86E I want to finish as an Italian airforce plane.

I had a look around the internet and I found some pictures with ejection seat in what could be dull silver or very light grey, but then I found a comment here on Brit, from, I think Giorgio N (Sorry it seems I can't find it right now), saying that the seats on Italian planes were Black.

I checked the pics I have and he is right you can clearly see the upper frame being black, also the head rest is black too. now my question is very simple, was the seat completely black?

Does anybody have a picture?

Thanks

Paolo

If the upper part of the seat is black, then I would guess the remainder would be too. True, not many colour pics of AMI Sabre cockpits abound, but they are ex-RAF and they were black then.

Cheers, Tony (miles away from any of my references)

[Giorgio N]

Paolo,

wonder if this was the thread you were looking for ?

http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/64628-na-f-86em-sabre/

Here I had posted that I had seen pictures with black cockpits and others with grey ones. The same likely applied to the seats.

As to when the cockpit colour changed, it could have been during the refurbishment work done before delivery or at a later date when the aircrafts were already in Italian service. A possiblity is that the cockpits changed colour when the aircrafts lost the camouflage, but IIRC there are images of metal aicrafts with black cockpits.

For aircrafts with black cockpits, the details would have been the same of the RAF aircrafts

Edited April 23, 2013 by Giorgio N

[James Craik]

Hi all

I am midway trough an Airfix F-86E I want to finish as an Italian airforce plane.

I had a look around the internet and I found some pictures with ejection seat in what could be dull silver or very light grey, but then I found a comment here on Brit, from, I think Giorgio N (Sorry it seems I can't find it right now), saying that the seats on Italian planes were Black.

I checked the pics I have and he is right you can clearly see the upper frame being black, also the head rest is black too. now my question is very simple, was the seat completely black?

Does anybody have a picture?

Thanks

Paolohttp

MK1,2,3,4 seat

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f179/sabresix/Mk2-4_zps9a295483.jpg

Mk1,2,3,4 seat.

Edited April 23, 2013 by James Craik

[Paolo6691]

Thank you all for the answers

I already painted the cockpit black, so I will paint the seat black too.

Thanks a lot

Paolo